


in no lax bed may sleep

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Background Poly, Deepthroating, Kinktober, M/M, Oral Sex, Reunion Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 14:51:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16177346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: "I won't be a bit of good to you before I sleep," Lanyon said, and fell to his knees before the bed. "Let me, Spuddy?"





	in no lax bed may sleep

It was oddly difficult to have Ralph in his room, looking around. Laurie, early aware of the likelihood of it being discomfiting, had met him at the train station and taken him on as much of a walk as could be managed, between Ralph’s miasma of exhaustion and his leg, which had become rather worse with the cold and the cessation of regular physiotherapy. It had been somewhat of a mixed thing, in the end. Ralph had lightened visibly, looking for once a haggard twenty-seven rather than his habitual thirty-five, and hadn’t looked nearly as out of place as he might have two years ago.

“I wish,” Laurie said, after Ralph had exchanged nods with what seemed like all of Brasenose’s itinerant population, “that you’d seen it earlier. ”

“I have. I used to come up to see Alec, the first year or so.”

That ought to have prepared Laurie for the tenor of the day: Ralph knew his way around, and agreed it was a shame that Christ Church no longer produced the famous meringues with an intensity that bespoke familiarity with the product. It was churlish to resent his familiarity, even tangled as it was in other intimacies, but Laurie felt rather like he had at three, trying to tell his mother all about Great Uncle Edward. That was the feeling, he told himself rather sharply. Nothing else.

“Lucky you got a set on the ground floor,” Ralph was saying when Laurie, properly chastised, was again able to pay attention. “I remember the stairs were bad enough even on rum.”

“Rather,” Laurie said, with an ease he was very far from feeling. “I thought we could go down to the river.”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” Ralph said, and offered him a smile just as startling now that summer had faded from his skin. “Spud, I need to put my bag down.”

With Ralph’s eyes on them, Laurie’s possessions looked neglected, unloved, the clothes shoved into the wardrobe, the books left open or dog-eared, the desk blotched with ink. He had never quite outgrown the schoolboy habit of using it as a wooden extension of a copy-book; coming up behind Ralph he could see it bore the barest outline of his last essay, and stepped back just in time to meet another of Ralph’s smiles, fonder this time and more private.

“My dear, tell me it wasn’t playing Laertes that decided you on English.”

Laurie, surprised into a laugh, leaned into the following kiss with greater ease than he might otherwise have found, and put his arms about Ralph’s neck, content to have his weight supported. On the verge of complaint he found himself manoeuvred onto the bed, with Ralph’s usual odd deftness. While no taller, Laurie had regained the weight the privations of military and medical restraint had sloughed from his frame, and Ralph only grown leaner. But even in school he’d been stronger than he looked and looked tougher than he by rights should have. In the unshaded light over Laurie’s bed the lines on his face were graven in; he looked weary and very dear, turning his face into Laurie’s kisses, nudging into the open triangle of his unbuttoned collar.

Laurie, moving to reciprocate, found his hands pushed away before he had done much more than loosen Ralph’s tie, pinned to the bed with a calm that promised further shows of strength if disobeyed. “I won’t be any good till I’ve slept,” Ralph said, and when Laurie attempted an inchoate apology and a promise to let him rest, added, “Let me, Spuddy? I’ve rather been dreaming of it.”

Laurie subsided with alacrity. If Ralph in Oxford had never formed part of his fantasies, the same could not be said of his mouth, which had in both presence and fond memory eased Laurie through difficult nights.

Ralph’s own eagerness, evident in his disinclination to do more than briefly ensure Laurie’s leg was unlikely to be jarred before he slid to his knees before the bed, did away with the last of Laurie’s guilty hesitation. He came up hard in the time it took Ralph to open his trousers and push his pants down, and Ralph’s mouth closed loosely around his helmet and went down with habitual ease.

It had been months since they had met. Laurie, stifling his groans against his flattened palm, couldn’t bring himself to care whether Ralph’d kept himself in practice on unsuspecting subs or simply thinking of Laurie. His body, usually so resigned to its own brokenness, tried to curl up around Ralph’s head in his lap, hold him down and keep him working, his lips nearly meeting Laurie’s groin, Laurie’s dick nudging the back of his throat. He was going to pull a muscle he couldn’t spare, and there would be no way to explain why, but he couldn’t spare the attention to restrain himself, with everything urging him deeper, further, harder.

Ralph’s hands came up, gripping him at hip and thigh, holding him in place. Laurie, caught between the need to push up into his mouth and to avoid bruising Ralph’s throat or hurting himself, managed after a while to wrap his right hand around the fingers of Ralph’s left, rather automatically moving it in imitation of Ralph: an expression of sympathy and desire. He had stopped wearing the glove when he went back to the sea, needing both hands for too many things to bother with unnecessary disguise, and the keloid was hard and smooth like the roof of his mouth, if not as deft at trapping Laurie in wet warmth and reducing him to incoherent comparisons while his blood pooled at the point of contact and his body arched and strained towards satiation.

“Ralph,” he managed, frantic and petting his hand, his shoulder, the back of his head. “ _Ralph_ you... I’m...”

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, Laurie woke to Ralph sitting at his desk, leafing through the slim volume of Donne Andrew had lent him the week before. He looked up at Laurie’s fumbling attempts to sit up and said, unsmiling, “Is he around?”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the sonnet Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane write in Gaudy Night, no apologies sufficient or indeed offered.


End file.
